Age of Empyrean
- A 10,000 square foot, 299 seat “multipurpose performance and hospitality complex” called the Empyrean Club is slated to open on Troutman Street next year. The developers—a trio of Manhattan producer types—plan to kick things off with a musical production of American Psycho. Maybe this guy can star in that one.
Beware The Toothtaker
- Speaking of psychopaths, the word on Reddit is that a real life villain straight out of Breaking Bad has been spotted on the loose in Brooklyn: Isaiah “Toothtaker” Machado, a once prominent Tucson tattoo artist with a slew of rape accusations, who apparently shows up in town every now and then to terrorize local dive bars. In all seriousness, Machado is considered armed and dangerous, so if you find yourself at the bar next to someone sporting his trademark “I Want To Kill You” forehead tattoo, make sure it’s another guy with that tattoo and not him.
Bushwick Bedlam
- The newly constructed Lindon Grove Senior Residences building was the site of a brutal assault and suicide late last month, when a man attacked his mother’s caregiver with a knife before taking a thirteen story dive to his death.
Mr. Hing’s Kitchen Murder
- A judge recently overturned Anthony Sims’s conviction for the 1998 murder of a cook at the Bushwick restaurant Mr. Hing’s Kitchen (since renamed “New Mr. Hing”), for which Sims spent decades in prison. Long portrayed in the tabloids as a trivial dispute over uncooked Chinese food, a New York Focus article shows a tragic story of betrayal by Sims’s friend, the likely killer Julius Graves, and a pattern of systemic corruption under the case’s DA and prosecutor.
Condo Life!
- Gothamist housing reporter David Brand documents the “crappy luxury” of life at the Blue Slip building in Greenpoint, and similarly pricey properties that have suffered flooding, lack of hot water, and other subpar conditions. It’s no secret that the condos built during the hyperdrive gentrification of Billyburg and other areas in the 2010s were often underfunded, ununionized rush jobs — leading to scenarios like First Boy Jared Kushner’s Williamsburg nightmare castle and the subsonic trash chute of Park Avenue in Manhattan.
- Similarly, the Post’s Nicole Rosenthal covered landlords in those areas who are refusing to test their properties for toxic underground fumes. Hell, there’s so many new arrivals here these days, a lot of them probably don’t even know about the Greenpoint Oil Blob. Learn the lore, whelps!
Beware The Screamer
- Fortunately the Williamsburg waterfront is also currently being terrorized by the Williamsburg Screamer, a local hero who “every night will scream at the top of his lungs, sometimes for hours.”
Chill News
- In Chill News, New York Groove’s Tim Donnelly has the story of how the Bike Plant, over in Bed-Stuy kicked off 2026 by transforming into a worker owned co-op. #thatschillnewsbro
ICE -> OUT
- AMNY was on the scene at JFK after Old Man Trump sent ICE agents to the airports this week—some of whom seem to be on the fresh-faced side. Scuffles between reporters and camera shy goons ensued, with ICE running to unsympathetic cops for help at one point. “Go after their asses,” one airline worker told members of the media as they pursued them until they took shelter in a barroom.
Laws Aren’t Real
- On Wednesday, federal prosecutors made the what-the-fuck announcement that the thousands of ICE arrests at and the chaotic, violent occupation of 26 Federal Plaza for the past year—were never in fact, authorized by ICE at all, per a memo released last week by Pam Bondi’s U.S. Department of Justice in a legal case surrounding the arrests. “The 2025 ICE Guidance does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near Executive Office for Immigration Review immigration courts,” government lawyers admitted, something the Trump administration officials blamed on “agency attorney error.” To clarify: somebody just looked at a document twice and basically said: whoa, sorry we let thousands of people be arrested, turns out that wasn’t even allowed or whatever. Just kidding, they probably used ChaptGPT.
- In other legal news, the NYPD argued in court that’s its not their job to protect people from violent mobs, their defense of letting a woman get beat up by Chabad Zionists in Crown Heights last year. (It turns out the woman, mistaken for a pro-Palestine activist at a rally, was just a random onlooker outside a speech given by Israeli politician and war pig Itamar Gen Gvir.) Given that the Supreme Court has said already cops don’t have to protect you, put your Kalshi bucks on the boys in blue this time.
PEDO NAZI VS. TERROR TEENS
- Hell Gate has a thorough rundown of the chaotic happenings outside Gracie Mansion earlier this month after Neo-Nazi influencer Jake Lang—a J6-er pardoned by Trump after four years in prison— spent a weekend doing his brand of racism for fun and profit and “performing a lewd act with a live goat”—culminating in a hate rally outside Gracie Mansion designed to draw counter protestors.
- Among those arrested were a pair of allegedly ISIS-sympathizing teens from Pennsylvania (one of whom had been reported missing earlier that day by his mother) were charged with wielding weapons of mass destruction after tossing homemade contraptions loaded with screws and explosive powder. A half dozen others were arrested for skirmishes involving pepper spray and raw eggs.
- Just a few days later, Lang was exposed by amateur pedo-hunters in a To Catch A Predator-style sting for flirting with and planning to meet someone he believed to be a 15 year old girl. (A half dozen other January 6th-ers have been charged with child sex crimes so far, with dozens of others catching unrelated charges.)
- Current whereabouts of the goat are unknown.
Brian Jones Kraft is a writer who has been living in Bushwick for over a decade and a half. He has previously written extensively about the legacy of Andrew Cuomo, David Dinkins and that mural on the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Evergreen.
Top photo taken by Billy Dinh.
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